White trash
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White trash is a derogatory
racial A race is a categorization of humans based on shared physical or social qualities into groups generally viewed as distinct within a given society. The term came into common usage during the 1500s, when it was used to refer to groups of variou ...
and class-related slur used in
American English American English, sometimes called United States English or U.S. English, is the set of variety (linguistics), varieties of the English language native to the United States. English is the Languages of the United States, most widely spoken lan ...
to refer to poor
white people White is a racialized classification of people and a skin color specifier, generally used for people of European origin, although the definition can vary depending on context, nationality, and point of view. Description of populations as ...
, especially in the rural
southern United States The Southern United States (sometimes Dixie, also referred to as the Southern States, the American South, the Southland, or simply the South) is a geographic and cultural region of the United States of America. It is between the Atlantic Ocean ...
. The label signifies a
social class A social class is a grouping of people into a set of Dominance hierarchy, hierarchical social categories, the most common being the Upper class, upper, Middle class, middle and Working class, lower classes. Membership in a social class can for ...
inside the white population and especially a degraded standard of living. It is used as a way to separate the "noble and hardworking" "good poor" from the lazy, "undisciplined, ungrateful and disgusting" "bad poor". Use of the term provides for middle- and upper-class whites a means of distancing themselves from the poverty and powerlessness of poor whites, who cannot enjoy those privileges. The term has been adopted for people living on the fringes of the social order, who are seen as dangerous because they may be criminal, unpredictable, and without respect for political, legal, or moral authority. While the term is mostly used pejoratively by urban and middle-class whites as a class signifier, some white entertainers self-identify as "white trash", considering it a badge of honor, and celebrate the stereotypes and social marginalization of lower-class whiteness. In common usage, "white trash" overlaps in meaning with " cracker", used of people in the backcountry of the Southern states; "
hillbilly Hillbilly is a term (often derogatory) for people who dwell in rural, mountainous areas in the United States, primarily in southern Appalachia and the Ozarks. The term was later used to refer to people from other rural and mountainous areas west ...
", regarding poor people from
Appalachia Appalachia () is a cultural region in the Eastern United States that stretches from the Southern Tier of New York State to northern Alabama and Georgia. While the Appalachian Mountains stretch from Belle Isle in Newfoundland and Labrador, Ca ...
; "
Okie An Okie is a person identified with the state of Oklahoma. This connection may be residential, ethnic, historical or cultural. For most Okies, several (or all) of these connections exist and are collectively the source of their being Oklahoman. ...
" regarding those with origins in Oklahoma; and "
redneck ''Redneck'' is a derogatory term chiefly, but not exclusively, applied to white Americans perceived to be crass and unsophisticated, closely associated with rural whites of the Southern United States.Harold Wentworth, and Stuart Berg Flexner, '' ...
", regarding rural origins; especially in the South. The primary difference is that "redneck", "cracker", "Okie", and "hillbilly" emphasize that a person is poor and uneducated and comes from the backwoods with little awareness of and interaction with the modern world, while "white trash" – and the modern term "
trailer trash ''Trailer trash'' is a derogatory North American English term for poor people living in a trailer or a mobile home. It is particularly used to denigrate white people living in such circumstances History In the mid-20th century, poor whites who ...
" – emphasizes the person's supposed moral failings, without regard to the setting of their upbringing. While the other terms suggest rural origins, "white trash" and "trailer trash" may be urban or suburban. Scholars from the late 19th to the early 21st century explored generations of families who were considered "disreputable", such as the
Jukes family The Jukes family was a New York "hill family" studied in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The studies are part of a series of other family studies, including the Kallikaks, the Zeros and the Nams, that were often quoted as arguments in s ...
and the Kallikak family, both
pseudonym A pseudonym (; ) or alias () is a fictitious name that a person or group assumes for a particular purpose, which differs from their original or true name (orthonym). This also differs from a new name that entirely or legally replaces an individua ...
s for real families.


Terminology

The expression "white trash" probably originated in the slang used by enslaved African Americans, in the early decades of the 1800s, and was quickly adopted by richer white people who used the term to stigmatize the kind of whites they considered to be inferior. "Poor white trash", then, is the term for the "bad poor", not the romanticized "noble and hardworking" "good poor"
Nancy Isenberg Nancy G. Isenberg is an American historian, and T. Harry Williams Professor of history at Louisiana State University. Life She graduated from Rutgers University, and University of Wisconsin A university () is an institution of higher (o ...
compiled a long list of derisive names that have been used to refer to poor whites:


Description and causes

In the popular imagination of the mid-19th century, "poor white trash" were a "curious" breed of degenerate, gaunt, haggard people who suffered from numerous physical and social defects. They were dirty, callow, ragged, cadaverous, leathery, and emaciated, and had feeble children with distended abdomens who were wrinkled and withered and looked aged beyond their physical years, so that even 10-year-olds' "countenances are stupid and heavy and they often become dropsical and loathsome to sight," according to a New Hampshire schoolteacher. The skin of a poor white Southerner had a "ghastly yellowish-white" tinge to it, like "yellow parchment", and was waxy looking, or they were so white they almost appeared to be
albino Albinism is the congenital absence of melanin in an animal or plant resulting in white hair, feathers, scales and skin and pink or blue eyes. Individuals with the condition are referred to as albino. Varied use and interpretation of the term ...
s. They were listless and slothful, did not properly care for their children, and were addicted to alcohol. They were looked on with contempt by upper-class Southerners.
Harriet Beecher Stowe Harriet Elisabeth Beecher Stowe (; June 14, 1811 – July 1, 1896) was an American author and abolitionist. She came from the religious Beecher family and became best known for her novel ''Uncle Tom's Cabin'' (1852), which depicts the harsh ...
described a white trash woman and her children in '' Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp'', published in 1856: Poor white trash were generally only able to locate themselves on the worst land in the South, since the best land was taken by the slaveholders, large and small. They lived and attempted to survive on land that was sandy or swampy or covered in scrub pine and not suited for agriculture; for this, they became known as "sandhillers" and "pineys". These "hard-scratch" inhabitants were seen to match their surroundings: they were "stony, stumpy, and shrubby, as the land they lived on." Restricted from holding political office due to property qualifications, their ability to vote at the mercy of the courts, which were controlled by the slave-holding planters, poor whites had few advocates within the political system or the dominant social hierarchy. Although many were tenant farmers or day laborers, other white trash people were forced to live as scavengers, thieves and vagrants, but all, employed or not, were socially ostracized by "proper" white society by being forced to use the back door when entering "proper" homes. Even slaves looked down on them: when poor whites came begging for food, the slaves called them "stray goats." Northerners claimed that the existence of white trash was the result of the system of slavery in the South, while Southerners worried that these clearly inferior whites would upset the "natural" class system which held that all whites were superior to all other races, especially blacks. People of both regions expressed concern that if the number of white trash people increased significantly, they would threaten the Jeffersonian ideal of a population of educated white freemen as the basis of a robust American democracy. In his classic study, ''
Democracy in America (; published in two volumes, the first in 1835 and the second in 1840) is a classic French text by Alexis de Tocqueville. Its title literally translates to ''On Democracy in America'', but official English translations are usually simply entitl ...
'' (1835), French aristocrat
Alexis de Tocqueville Alexis Charles Henri Clérel, comte de Tocqueville (; 29 July 180516 April 1859), colloquially known as Tocqueville (), was a French aristocrat, diplomat, political scientist, political philosopher and historian. He is best known for his works ...
sees the state of poor white southerners as being one of the effects of the slave system. He describes them as ignorant, idle, prideful, self-indulgent, and weak, and writes about southern whites in general: Another theory held that the degraded condition of poor white southerners was the result of their living in such close proximity to blacks and Native Americans.
Samuel Stanhope Smith Samuel Stanhope Smith (March 15, 1751 – August 21, 1819) was a Presbyterian minister, founding president of Hampden–Sydney College and the seventh president of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University) from 1795 to 1812. His stormy ...
, a minister and educator who was the seventh president of
Princeton College Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the ni ...
, wrote in 1810 that poor white southerners lived in "a state of absolute savagism," which caused them to resemble Indians in the color of their skin and their clothing, a belief that was endemic in the 18th and early 19th century. Smith saw them as a stumbling block in the evolution of mainstream American whites, a view that had previously been expressed by Michel-Guillaume-Jean de Crèvecoeur in his 1782 book, ''
Letters from an American Farmer ''Letters from an American Farmer'' is a series of letters written by French American writer J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur, first published in 1782. The considerably longer title under which it was originally published is ''Letters from an ...
''. Crèvecoeur, a French soldier-diplomat who resettled in the United States and changed his name to J. Hector St. John, considered poor white southerners to be "not ... a very pleasing spectacle" and inferior to the prototypical American he celebrated in his book, but still hopes that the effects of progress would improve the condition of these mongrelized, untamed, half-savage drunken people who exhibit "the most hideous parts of our society." For
Ralph Waldo Emerson Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803April 27, 1882), who went by his middle name Waldo, was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, abolitionist, and poet who led the transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champ ...
, the transcendentalist and pre-eminent American lecturer, writer and philosopher of the mid-nineteenth century, poor people of all kinds – including poor white Southerners – lived in poverty because of inherent traits in their nature. The poor were "ferried over the Atlantic & carted to America to ditch & to drudge, to make the land fertile ... and then to lie down prematurely to make a spot of greener grass..." These people Emerson referred to as "guano" were fated to inhabit the lowest niches of society, and he specifically excluded them from his definition of what an ''American'' was. Emerson's "American" was of
Saxon The Saxons ( la, Saxones, german: Sachsen, ang, Seaxan, osx, Sahson, nds, Sassen, nl, Saksen) were a group of Germanic * * * * peoples whose name was given in the early Middle Ages to a large country (Old Saxony, la, Saxonia) near the Nor ...
heritage, descended from the Danes, Norsemen, Saxons and Anglo-Saxons, known for their "excess of virility", their "beastly ferocity", and – at least in Emerson's eyes – their beauty. These were not traits which were shared by the poor white Southerner. Americans may have degenerated somewhat in comparison to their ancestors, one of the weakening effects of civilization, but they still maintained their superiority over other "races", and white Southerners of all kinds, but especially poor ones, were themselves inferior to their countrymen from New England and the north. Some, such as
Theodore Roosevelt Theodore Roosevelt Jr. ( ; October 27, 1858 – January 6, 1919), often referred to as Teddy or by his initials, T. R., was an American politician, statesman, soldier, conservationist, naturalist, historian, and writer who served as the 26t ...
, saw poor "degenerate" whites – as well as the mass of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe (those from northern Europe having been accepted in the Anglo-Saxon white race) – as being a major part of the problem of "
race suicide Race suicide was an alarmist term used in eugenics, coined in 1900 by the sociologist Edward A. Ross. Racial suicide rhetoric suggested a differential birth rate between native-born Protestant and immigrant Catholic women, or more generally betw ...
", the concept that poor whites and unwanted immigrants would eventually out-procreate those of the dominant and superior white "race", causing it to die out or be supplanted, to the detriment of the country. According to Allyson Drinkard, in modern American society, to be considered "white trash" is different from simply being poor and white. The term


As a racial slur

In the journal '' Critique of Anthropology'', J. Z. Wilson argues that the term "white trash" "stands as a form of racism", and Annalee Newitz and Matthew Wray, writing in ''
The Minnesota Review ''The Minnesota Review'' is a literary magazine covering literary and cultural studies which places a special emphasis on politically engaged criticism, fiction, and poetry. Issues are often "themed," recent issues examining the nature of acade ...
'' consider it an instance of "Yoking a classist epithet to a racist one." It is described as a "racial slur" by Lucas Lynch, and filmmaker
John Waters John Samuel Waters Jr. (born April 22, 1946) is an American filmmaker, writer, actor, and artist. He rose to fame in the early 1970s for his Cinema of Transgression, transgressive cult films, including ''Multiple Maniacs'' (1970), ''Pink Flamin ...
considered it the "last racist thing you can say and get away with." In 2020, ''
Reader's Digest ''Reader's Digest'' is an American general-interest family magazine, published ten times a year. Formerly based in Chappaqua, New York, it is now headquartered in midtown Manhattan. The magazine was founded in 1922 by DeWitt Wallace and his wi ...
'' included "white trash" on its list of "12 Everyday Expressions That Are Actually Racist".


History

Beginning in the early 17th century, the
City of London The City of London is a city, ceremonial county and local government district that contains the historic centre and constitutes, alongside Canary Wharf, the primary central business district (CBD) of London. It constituted most of London fr ...
shipped their unwanted excess population, including vagrant children, to the American colonies – especially the
Colony of Virginia The Colony of Virginia, chartered in 1606 and settled in 1607, was the first enduring English colonial empire, English colony in North America, following failed attempts at settlement on Newfoundland (island), Newfoundland by Sir Humphrey GilbertG ...
, the Province of Maryland, and the
Province of Pennsylvania The Province of Pennsylvania, also known as the Pennsylvania Colony, was a British North American colony founded by William Penn after receiving a land grant from Charles II of England in 1681. The name Pennsylvania ("Penn's Woods") refers to W ...
– where they became not
apprentices Apprenticeship is a system for training a new generation of practitioners of a trade or profession with on-the-job training and often some accompanying study (classroom work and reading). Apprenticeships can also enable practitioners to gain a ...
, as the children had been told, but
indentured servants Indentured servitude is a form of labor in which a person is contracted to work without salary for a specific number of years. The contract, called an "indenture", may be entered "voluntarily" for purported eventual compensation or debt repayment, ...
, especially working in the fields. Even before the beginning of the
Atlantic slave trade The Atlantic slave trade, transatlantic slave trade, or Euro-American slave trade involved the transportation by slave traders of enslaved African people, mainly to the Americas. The slave trade regularly used the triangular trade route and i ...
brought Africans to the
British colonies A Crown colony or royal colony was a colony administered by The Crown within the British Empire. There was usually a Governor, appointed by the British monarch on the advice of the UK Government, with or without the assistance of a local Counci ...
in 1619, this influx of "transported" English, Welsh, Scots, and
Irish Irish may refer to: Common meanings * Someone or something of, from, or related to: ** Ireland, an island situated off the north-western coast of continental Europe ***Éire, Irish language name for the isle ** Northern Ireland, a constituent unit ...
was a crucial part of the American workforce. The
Virginia Company The Virginia Company was an English trading company chartered by King James I on 10 April 1606 with the object of colonizing the eastern coast of America. The coast was named Virginia, after Elizabeth I, and it stretched from present-day Main ...
also imported boatloads of poor women to be sold as brides. The numbers of these all-but-slaves was significant: by the middle of the 17th century, at a time when the population of Virginia was 11,000, only 300 were Africans, who were outnumbered by English, Irish and Scots indentured servants. In
New England New England is a region comprising six states in the Northeastern United States: Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont. It is bordered by the state of New York to the west and by the Canadian provinces ...
, one-fifth of the
Puritans The Puritans were English Protestants in the 16th and 17th centuries who sought to purify the Church of England of Roman Catholic practices, maintaining that the Church of England had not been fully reformed and should become more Protestant. P ...
were indentured servants. More indentured servants were sent to the colonies as a result of insurrections in Ireland.
Oliver Cromwell Oliver Cromwell (25 April 15993 September 1658) was an English politician and military officer who is widely regarded as one of the most important statesmen in English history. He came to prominence during the 1639 to 1651 Wars of the Three Ki ...
sent hundreds of
Irish Catholics Irish Catholics are an ethnoreligious group native to Ireland whose members are both Catholic and Irish. They have a large diaspora, which includes over 36 million American citizens and over 14 million British citizens (a quarter of the British ...
to British North America during the
Irish Confederate Wars The Irish Confederate Wars, also called the Eleven Years' War (from ga, Cogadh na hAon-déag mBliana), took place in Ireland between 1641 and 1653. It was the Irish theatre of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, a series of civil wars in the kin ...
(1641–1653). In 1717, the
Parliament of Great Britain The Parliament of Great Britain was formed in May 1707 following the ratification of the Acts of Union by both the Parliament of England and the Parliament of Scotland. The Acts ratified the treaty of Union which created a new unified Kingdo ...
passed the
Transportation Act 1717 The Piracy Act 1717 (4 Geo 1 c 11), sometimes called the Transportation Act 1717 (1718 in New Style), was an Act of the Parliament of Great Britain that established a regulated, bonded system to transport criminals to colonies in North Ame ...
, which allowed for the
penal transportation Penal transportation or transportation was the relocation of convicted criminals, or other persons regarded as undesirable, to a distant place, often a colony, for a specified term; later, specifically established penal colonies became their ...
of tens of thousands of convicts to North America, in order to alleviate overcrowding in British prisons. By the time penal transportation ceased during the
American Revolutionary War The American Revolutionary War (April 19, 1775 – September 3, 1783), also known as the Revolutionary War or American War of Independence, was a major war of the American Revolution. Widely considered as the war that secured the independence of t ...
(1775–1783), some 50,000 people had been transported to the
New World The term ''New World'' is often used to mean the majority of Earth's Western Hemisphere, specifically the Americas."America." ''The Oxford Companion to the English Language'' (). McArthur, Tom, ed., 1992. New York: Oxford University Press, p. 3 ...
under the law. When the American market closed to them, the convicts were then sent to Australia. In total, 300,000 to 400,000 people were shipped to the North American colonies as unfree laborers, between 1/2 and 2/3 of all white immigrants. The British conceived of the American colonies as a "wasteland", and a place to dump their
underclass The underclass is the segment of the population that occupies the lowest possible position in a class hierarchy, below the core body of the working class. The general idea that a class system includes a population ''under'' the working class has ...
. The people they sent there were "waste people", the "scum and dregs" of society. The term "waste people" gave way to "squatters" and "crackers", used to describe the settlers who populated the
Western frontier The American frontier, also known as the Old West or the Wild West, encompasses the geography, history, folklore, and culture associated with the forward wave of American expansion in mainland North America that began with European colonial ...
of the United States and the backcountry of some southern states, but who did not have title to the land they settled on, and had little or no access to education or religious training. "Cracker" was especially used in the south. The first use of "white trash" in print to describe this population occurred in 1821. It came into common use in the 1830s as a pejorative used by
house slave A house slave was a slave who worked, and often lived, in the house of the slave-owner, performing domestic labor. House slaves performed largely the same duties as all domestic workers throughout history, such as cooking, cleaning, serving meals, ...
s against poor whites. In 1833,
Fanny Kemble Frances Anne "Fanny" Kemble (27 November 180915 January 1893) was a British actress from a theatre family in the early and mid-19th century. She was a well-known and popular writer and abolitionist, whose published works included plays, poetry ...
, an English actress visiting Georgia, noted in her journal: "The slaves themselves entertain the very highest contempt for white servants, whom they designate as 'poor white trash'". The term achieved widespread popularity in the 1850s, and by 1855, it had passed into common usage by upper-class whites, and was common usage among all Southerners, regardless of race, throughout the rest of the 19th century. In 1854, Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote the chapter "Poor White Trash" in her book ''
A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin ''A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin'' is a book by American author Harriet Beecher Stowe. It was published to document the veracity of the depiction of slavery in Stowe's anti-slavery novel ''Uncle Tom's Cabin'' (1852). First published in 1853 by Jewet ...
''. Stowe wrote that slavery not only produces "degraded, miserable slaves", but also poor whites who are even more degraded and miserable. The
plantation system A plantation economy is an economy based on agricultural mass production, usually of a few commodity crops, grown on large farms worked by laborers or slaves. The properties are called plantations. Plantation economies rely on the export of cash ...
forced those whites to struggle for subsistence. Beyond economic factors, Stowe traces this class to the shortage of schools and churches in their community, and says that both blacks and whites in the area look down on these "poor white trash". In Stowe's second novel ''Dred'', she describes the poor white inhabitants of that swamp, which formed much of the border between Virginia and North Carolina, as an ignorant, degenerate and immoral class of people prone to criminality.
Hinton Rowan Helper Hinton Rowan Helper (December 27, 1829 – March 9, 1909) was an American Southern critic of slavery during the 1850s. In 1857, he published a book that he dedicated to the "nonslaveholding whites" of the South. '' The Impending Crisis of the S ...
's extremely influential 1857 book ''
The Impending Crisis of the South ''The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It'' is an 1857 book by Hinton Rowan Helper, who declares himself a proud Southerner. It was written mostly in Baltimore, but it would have been illegal to publish it there, as he pointed out. It wa ...
'' – which sold 140,000 copies and was considered to be the most important book of the 19th century by many people – describes the region's poor Caucasians as a class oppressed by the effects of slavery, a people of lesser physical stature who would be driven to extinction by the South's "cesspool of degradation and ignorance." Jeffrey Glossner of the University of Mississippi writes: The
Brandeis University , mottoeng = "Truth even unto its innermost parts" , established = , type = Private research university , accreditation = NECHE , president = Ronald D. Liebowitz , pro ...
historian
David Hackett Fischer David Hackett Fischer (born December 2, 1935) is University Professor of History Emeritus at Brandeis University. Fischer's major works have covered topics ranging from large macroeconomic and cultural trends (''Albion's Seed,'' ''The Great Wave ( ...
makes a case for an enduring genetic basis for a "willingness to resort to violence" (citing especially the finding of high blood levels of
testosterone Testosterone is the primary sex hormone and anabolic steroid in males. In humans, testosterone plays a key role in the development of Male reproductive system, male reproductive tissues such as testes and prostate, as well as promoting secondar ...
) in the four main chapters of his book ''
Albion's Seed ''Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America'' is a 1989 book by David Hackett Fischer that details the folkways of four groups of people who moved from distinct regions of Great Britain ( Albion) to the United States. The argument is that ...
''. He proposes that a Mid-Atlantic state, Southern and Western propensity for violence is inheritable by genetic changes wrought over generations living in traditional herding societies in
Northern England Northern England, also known as the North of England, the North Country, or simply the North, is the northern area of England. It broadly corresponds to the former borders of Angle Northumbria, the Anglo-Scandinavian Kingdom of Jorvik, and the ...
, the
Scottish Borders The Scottish Borders ( sco, the Mairches, 'the Marches'; gd, Crìochan na h-Alba) is one of 32 council areas of Scotland. It borders the City of Edinburgh, Dumfries and Galloway, East Lothian, Midlothian, South Lanarkshire, West Lothi ...
, and Irish
Border Region The Border Region (coded IE041) is a NUTS Level III statistical region of Ireland. The name of the region refers to its location along the Republic of Ireland–United Kingdom border. It is not a cross-border region. It comprises the Irish coun ...
. He proposes that this propensity has been transferred to other ethnic groups by shared culture, whence it can be traced to different urban populations of the United States.


During the Civil War

During the
Civil War A civil war or intrastate war is a war between organized groups within the same state (or country). The aim of one side may be to take control of the country or a region, to achieve independence for a region, or to change government policies ...
, the Confederacy instituted
conscription Conscription (also called the draft in the United States) is the state-mandated enlistment of people in a national service, mainly a military service. Conscription dates back to antiquity and it continues in some countries to the present day un ...
to raise soldiers for its army, with all men between the ages of 18 and 35 being eligible to be drafted – later expanded to all men between 17 and 50. However, exemptions were numerous, including any slave-owner with more than 20 slaves, political officeholders, teachers, ministers and clerks, and men who worked in valuable trades. Left to be drafted, or to serve as paid substitutes, were poor white trash Southerners, who were looked down on as cannon fodder. Conscripts who failed to report for duty were hunted down by so-called "dog catchers". Poor southerners said that it was a "rich man's war", but "a poor man's fight." While upper-class Southern "cavalier" officers were granted frequent furloughs to return home, this was not the case with the ordinary private soldier, which led to an extremely high rate of desertion among this group, who put their families' well-being above the cause of the Confederacy, and thought of themselves as "Conditional Confederates." Deserters harassed soldiers, raided farms and stole food, and sometimes banded together in settlements, such as the "Free State of Jones" (formerly Jones County) in Mississippi; desertion was openly joked about. When found, deserters could be executed, or humiliated by being put into chains. Despite the war being fought to protect the right of the patrician elite of the South to own slaves, the planter class was reluctant to give up their cash crop, cotton, to grow the corn and grain needed by the Confederate armies and the civilian population. As a result, food shortages, exacerbated by
inflation In economics, inflation is an increase in the general price level of goods and services in an economy. When the general price level rises, each unit of currency buys fewer goods and services; consequently, inflation corresponds to a reductio ...
and hoarding of foodstuffs by the rich, caused the poor of the South to suffer greatly. This led to food riots of angry mobs of poor women, who raided stores, warehouses and depots looking for sustenance for their families. Both the male deserters and the female rioters put the lie to the myth of Confederate unity, and that the war was being fought for the rights of all white Southerners. Ideologically, the Confederacy claimed that the system of slavery in the South was superior to the class divisions of the North, because while the South devolved all its degrading labor onto what it saw as an inferior race, the black slaves, the North did so to its own "brothers in blood", the white working class. This the leaders and intellectuals of the Confederacy called "mudsill" democracy, and lauded the superiority of the pure-blooded Southern slave-owning "cavaliers" – who were worth five Northerners in a fight – over the sullied Anglo-Saxon upper class of the North. For its part, some of the military leaders of the North, especially Generals
Ulysses S. Grant Ulysses S. Grant (born Hiram Ulysses Grant ; April 27, 1822July 23, 1885) was an American military officer and politician who served as the 18th president of the United States from 1869 to 1877. As Commanding General, he led the Union Ar ...
and
William Tecumseh Sherman William Tecumseh Sherman ( ; February 8, 1820February 14, 1891) was an American soldier, businessman, educator, and author. He served as a general in the Union Army during the American Civil War (1861–1865), achieving recognition for his com ...
, recognized that their fight was not only to liberate slaves, but also the poor white Southerners who were oppressed by the system of slavery. Thus they took steps to exploit the class divisions between the "white trash" population and plantation owners. An Army chaplain wrote in a letter to his wife after the Union siege of Petersburg, Virginia that winning the war would not only result in the end of American slavery, but would also increase opportunities for "poor white trash." He said that the war would "knock off the shackles of millions of poor whites, whose bondage was really worse than that African." In these respects, the Civil War was in large part a
class war Class War is an anarchist group and newspaper established by Ian Bone and others in 1983 in the United Kingdom. An incarnation of Class War was briefly registered as a political party for the purposes of fighting the 2015 United Kingdom general ...
.


During Reconstruction

After the war, President
Andrew Johnson Andrew Johnson (December 29, 1808July 31, 1875) was the 17th president of the United States, serving from 1865 to 1869. He assumed the presidency as he was vice president at the time of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Johnson was a Dem ...
's first idea for the reconstruction of the South was not to take steps to create an egalitarian democracy. Instead, he envisioned what was essentially a "white trash republic", in which the aristocracy would maintain their property holdings and an amount of social power, but be disenfranchised until they could show their loyalty to the Union. The freed blacks would no longer be slaves, but would still be denied essential rights of citizenship and would make up the lowest rung on the social ladder. In between would be the poor white Southerner, the white trash, who while occupying a lesser social position, would essentially become the masters of the South, voting and occupying political offices, and maintaining a superior status to the free blacks and freed slaves. Emancipated from the inequities of the plantation system, poor white trash would become the bulwark of Johnson's rebuilding of the South and its restoration into the Union. Johnson's plan was never put into effect, and the
Freedmen's Bureau The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, usually referred to as simply the Freedmen's Bureau, was an agency of early Reconstruction, assisting freedmen in the South. It was established on March 3, 1865, and operated briefly as a ...
 – which was created in 1865, before President
Abraham Lincoln Abraham Lincoln ( ; February 12, 1809 – April 15, 1865) was an American lawyer, politician, and statesman who served as the 16th president of the United States from 1861 until his assassination in 1865. Lincoln led the nation thro ...
was
assassinated Assassination is the murder of a prominent or important person, such as a head of state, head of government, politician, world leader, member of a royal family or CEO. The murder of a celebrity, activist, or artist, though they may not have a ...
 – was authorized to help "all refugees and all freedmen", black and white alike. The agency did this despite Johnson's basic lack of concern for the freed slaves the war had supposedly been fought over. But even though they provided relief to them, the Bureau did not accept Johnson's vision of poor whites as the loyal and honorable foundation of a reconstructed South. Northern journalists and other observers maintained that poor white trash, who were now destitute refugees, "beggars, dependents, houseless and homeless wanderers", were still victimized by poverty and vagrancy. They were "loafers" dressed in rags and covered in filth who did no work, but accepted government relief handouts. They were seen as only slightly more intelligent than blacks. One observer, James R. Gilmore, a cotton merchant and novelist who had traveled throughout the South, wrote the book ''Down in Tennessee'', published in 1864, in which he differentiated poor whites into two groups, "mean whites" and "common whites". While the former were thieves, loafers, and brutes, the latter were law-abiding citizens who were enterprising and productive. It was the "mean" minority who gave white trash their bad name and character. A number of commentators noted that poor white Southerners did not compare favorably to freed blacks, who were described as "capable, thrifty, and loyal to the Union." Marcus Sterling, a Freedmen's Bureau agent and a former Union officer, said that the "pitiable class of poor whites" were "the only class which seem almost unaffected by the ureau'sgreat benevolence and its bold reform", while in contrast black freedmen had become "more settled, industrious and ambitious," eager to learn how to read and improve themselves. Sidney Andrews saw in blacks a "shrewd instinct for preservation" which poor whites did not have, and
Whitelaw Reid Whitelaw Reid (October 27, 1837 – December 15, 1912) was an American politician and newspaper editor, as well as the author of ''Ohio in the War'', a popular work of history. After assisting Horace Greeley as editor of the ''New-York Tribu ...
, a politician and newspaper editor from Ohio, thought that black children appeared eager to learn. ''
Atlantic Monthly ''The Atlantic'' is an American magazine and multi-platform publisher. It features articles in the fields of politics, foreign affairs, business and the economy, culture and the arts, technology, and science. It was founded in 1857 in Boston, ...
'' went so far as to suggest that government policy should switch from "disenfranchis ngthe humble, quiet, hardworking Negro" and cease to provide help to the "worthless barbarian", the "ignorant, illiterate, and vicious" white trash population. So, during the Reconstruction Era, white trash were no longer seen simply as a freakish, degenerate breed who lived almost invisibly in the backcountry wilderness, the war had brought them out of the darkness into the mainstream of society, where they developed the reputation of being a dangerous class of criminals, vagrants and delinquents, lacking intelligence, unable to speak properly, the "Homo genus without the sapien", an evolutionary dead end in the
Social Darwinist Social Darwinism refers to various theories and societal practices that purport to apply biological concepts of natural selection and survival of the fittest to sociology, economics and politics, and which were largely defined by scholars in W ...
thinking of the time. Plus, they were immoral, breaking all social codes and sexual norms, engaging in
incest Incest ( ) is human sexual activity between family members or close relatives. This typically includes sexual activity between people in consanguinity (blood relations), and sometimes those related by affinity (marriage or stepfamily), adoption ...
and prostitution, pimping out family members, and producing numerous in-bred bastard children.


Scalawags and rednecks

One of the responses of Southerners and Northern Democrats after the war to Reconstruction was the invention of the myth of the "
carpetbagger In the history of the United States, carpetbagger is a largely historical term used by Southerners to describe opportunistic Northerners who came to the Southern states after the American Civil War, who were perceived to be exploiting the lo ...
s", those Northern Republican scoundrels and adventurers who invaded the South to take advantage of its people, but less well known is that of the "
scalawag In United States history, the term scalawag (sometimes spelled scallawag or scallywag) referred to white Southerners who supported Reconstruction policies and efforts after the conclusion of the American Civil War. As with the term '' carpetb ...
s", those Southern white who betrayed their race by supporting the Republican Party and Reconstruction. The scalawag, even if they came from a higher social class, was often described as having a "white trash heart". They were accused of easily mingling with blacks, inviting them to dine in their homes, and inciting them by encouraging them to seek social equality. The Democrats retaliated with ''
Autobiography of a Scalawag "Autobiography of a Scalawag" appeared February 19, 1869, on the front page of The Native Virginian, Vol II No. 15. It has been referenced in the book ''"White Trash: The 400-year Untold History of Class"'' by Nancy Isenberg where the author ...
'', a parody of the standard "
self-made man "Self-made man" is a classic phrase coined on February 2, 1842 by Henry Clay in the United States Senate, to describe individuals whose success lay within the individuals themselves, not with outside conditions. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Foun ...
" story, in which a white trash southerner with no innate ambition nevertheless is raised to a position of middling power just by being in the right place at the right time or by lying and cheating. Around 1890, the term "redneck" began to be widely used for poor white southerners, especially those racist followers of the Democratic demagogues of the time. Rednecks were found working in the mills, living deep in the swamps, heckling at Republican rallies, and were even occasionally elected to be a state legislator. Such was the case with Guy Rencher, who claimed that "redneck" came from his own "long red neck".


Eugenics

Also around 1890, the
American eugenics movement Eugenics, the set of beliefs and practices which aims at improving the Genetics, genetic quality of the human population, played a significant role in the history and culture of the United States from the late 19th century into the mid-20th c ...
turned its attention to poor white trash. They were stigmatized as being feeble-minded and promiscuous, having incestuous and inter-racial sex, and abandoning or mistreating the children of those unions. Eugenicists campaigned successfully for laws which would allow rural whites fitting these descriptions to be involuntarily sterilized by the state, in order to "cleanse" society of faulty genetic heritages. In 1907,
Indiana Indiana () is a U.S. state in the Midwestern United States. It is the 38th-largest by area and the 17th-most populous of the 50 States. Its capital and largest city is Indianapolis. Indiana was admitted to the United States as the 19th s ...
passed the first eugenics-based
compulsory sterilization Compulsory sterilization, also known as forced or coerced sterilization, is a government-mandated program to involuntarily sterilize a specific group of people. Sterilization removes a person's capacity to reproduce, and is usually done throug ...
law in the world. Thirty U.S. states would soon follow their lead. Although the law was overturned by the
Indiana Supreme Court The Indiana Supreme Court, established by Article 7 of the Indiana Constitution, is the highest judicial authority in the state of Indiana. Located in Indianapolis, Indiana, Indianapolis, the Court's chambers are in the north wing of the Indiana ...
in 1921, in the 1927 case ''
Buck v. Bell ''Buck v. Bell'', 274 U.S. 200 (1927), is a decision of the United States Supreme Court, written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., in which the Court ruled that a state statute permitting compulsory sterilization of the unfit, including th ...
'', the
U.S. Supreme Court The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) is the highest court in the federal judiciary of the United States. It has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all U.S. federal court cases, and over state court cases that involve a point o ...
upheld the constitutionality of the
Virginia Sterilization Act of 1924 The Virginia Sterilization Act of 1924 was a U.S. state law in Virginia for the sterilization of institutionalized persons "afflicted with hereditary forms of insanity that are recurrent, idiocy, imbecility, feeble-mindedness or epilepsy”. It ...
, allowing for the
compulsory sterilization Compulsory sterilization, also known as forced or coerced sterilization, is a government-mandated program to involuntarily sterilize a specific group of people. Sterilization removes a person's capacity to reproduce, and is usually done throug ...
of patients of state mental institutions.


The Depression

The beginning of the 20th century brought no change of status for poor white southerners, especially after the onset of the
Great Depression The Great Depression (19291939) was an economic shock that impacted most countries across the world. It was a period of economic depression that became evident after a major fall in stock prices in the United States. The economic contagio ...
. The condition of this class was presented to the public in
Margaret Bourke-White Margaret Bourke-White (; June 14, 1904 – August 27, 1971), an American list of photographers, photographer and documentary photography, documentary photographer, became arguably best known as the first foreign photographer permitted to take p ...
's photographic series for ''
Life Life is a quality that distinguishes matter that has biological processes, such as signaling and self-sustaining processes, from that which does not, and is defined by the capacity for growth, reaction to stimuli, metabolism, energ ...
'' magazine, and the work of other photographers made for
Roy Stryker Roy Emerson Stryker (November 5, 1893 – September 27, 1975) was an American economist, government official, and photographer. He headed the Information Division of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) during the Great Depression, and launc ...
's Historical Section of the federal Resettlement Agency. Author
James Agee James Rufus Agee ( ; November 27, 1909 – May 16, 1955) was an American novelist, journalist, poet, screenwriter and film critic. In the 1940s, writing for ''Time Magazine'', he was one of the most influential film critics in the United States. ...
wrote about them in his ground-breaking work ''
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men ''Let Us Now Praise Famous Men'' is a book with text by American writer James Agee and photographs by American photographer Walker Evans, first published in 1941 in the United States. The work documents the lives of impoverished tenant farmers ...
'' (1941), as did
Jonathan Daniels Jonathan Myrick Daniels (March 20, 1939 – August 20, 1965) was an Episcopal seminarian and civil rights activist. In 1965, he was killed by a special county deputy, Tom Coleman, who was a construction worker, in Hayneville, Alabama, while ...
in ''A Southerner Discovers the South'' (1938). A number of
Franklin D. Roosevelt Franklin Delano Roosevelt (; ; January 30, 1882April 12, 1945), often referred to by his initials FDR, was an American politician and attorney who served as the 32nd president of the United States from 1933 until his death in 1945. As the ...
's
New Deal The New Deal was a series of programs, public work projects, financial reforms, and regulations enacted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the United States between 1933 and 1939. Major federal programs agencies included the Civilian Cons ...
agencies tried to help the rural poor to better themselves and to break through the social barriers of Southern society which held them back, reinstating the American Dream of upward mobility. Programs such as those of the Subsistence Homesteads Division of the
Department of the Interior The United States Department of the Interior (DOI) is one of the executive departments of the U.S. federal government headquartered at the Main Interior Building, located at 1849 C Street NW in Washington, D.C. It is responsible for the mana ...
; its successor, the Resettlement Administration, whose express purpose was to help the poor in rural areas; and its replacement, the
Farm Security Administration The Farm Security Administration (FSA) was a New Deal agency created in 1937 to combat rural poverty during the Great Depression in the United States. It succeeded the Resettlement Administration (1935–1937). The FSA is famous for its small but ...
which aimed to break the cycle of
tenant farming A tenant farmer is a person (farmer or farmworker) who resides on land owned by a landlord. Tenant farming is an agricultural production system in which landowners contribute their land and often a measure of operating capital and management, ...
and
sharecropping Sharecropping is a legal arrangement with regard to agricultural land in which a landowner allows a tenant to use the land in return for a share of the crops produced on that land. Sharecropping has a long history and there are a wide range ...
and help poor whites and black to own their own farms, and to initiate the creation of the communities necessary to support those farms. The agencies also provided services for migrant workers, such as the
Arkies Arkansas ( ) is a landlocked U.S. state, state in the South Central United States. It is bordered by Missouri to the north, Tennessee and Mississippi to the east, Louisiana to the south, and Texas and Oklahoma to the west. Its name is from ...
and
Okies An Okie is a person identified with the state of Oklahoma. This connection may be residential, ethnic, historical or cultural. For most Okies, several (or all) of these connections exist and are collectively the source of their being Oklahoman. ...
, who had been devastated by the
Dust Bowl The Dust Bowl was a period of severe dust storms that greatly damaged the ecology and agriculture of the American and Canadian prairies during the 1930s. The phenomenon was caused by a combination of both natural factors (severe drought) an ...
– the condition of which was well-documented by photographer
Dorothea Lange Dorothea Lange (born Dorothea Margaretta Nutzhorn; May 26, 1895 – October 11, 1965) was an American documentary photographer and photojournalist, best known for her Depression-era work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Lange' ...
in ''An American Exodus'' (1939) – and been forced to take to the road, jamming all their belongings into Ford motorcars and heading west toward California. Important in the devising and running of these programs were politicians and bureaucrats such as Henry Wallace, the
Secretary of Agriculture The United States secretary of agriculture is the head of the United States Department of Agriculture. The position carries similar responsibilities to those of agriculture ministers in other governments. The department includes several organi ...
; Milburn Lincoln Wilson, the first head of the Subsistence Homesteads Division, who was a social scientist and an agricultural expert; and Rexford G. Tugwell, a
Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...
economics professor who managed to be appointed the first head of the Resettlement Agency, despite refusing to present himself with a "homely, democratic manner" in his confirmation hearings. Tugwell understood that the status of tenant farmers would not change if they could not vote, so he campaigned against
poll tax A poll tax, also known as head tax or capitation, is a tax levied as a fixed sum on every liable individual (typically every adult), without reference to income or resources. Head taxes were important sources of revenue for many governments fr ...
, which prevented them voting, since they could not afford to pay it. His agency's goals were the four "R's": "retirement of bad land, relocation of rural poor, resettlement of the unemployed in suburban communities, and rehabilitation of farm families." Other individuals important in the fight to help the rural poor were
Arthur Raper Arthur Franklin Raper (8 November 1899 – 10 August 1979) was an American sociologist. He is best known for his research on lynching, sharecropping, and rural development. Life and career Raper grew up in Davidson County, North Carolina and atten ...
, an expert on tenancy farming, whose study ''Preface to Peasantry'' (1936) explained why the south's system held back the region's poor and caused them to migrate; and Howard Odum, a
University of North Carolina The University of North Carolina is the multi-campus public university system for the state of North Carolina. Overseeing the state's 16 public universities and the NC School of Science and Mathematics, it is commonly referred to as the UNC Sy ...
sociologist and psychologist who founded the journal ''
Social Forces ''Social Forces'' (formerly ''The Journal of Social Forces'') is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal of social science published by Oxford University Press for the Department of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. ...
'', and worked closely with the Federal government. Odum wrote the 600-page masterwork ''Southern Regions of the United States'', which became a guidebook for the New Deal. Journalist Gerald W. Johnson translated Odum's ideas in the book into a popular volume, ''The Wasted Land''. It was Odum who, in 1938, mailed questionnaires to academics to determine their views on what "poor white" meant to them. The results were in many ways indistinguishable from the popular views of "white trash" that had been held for many decades, since the words that came back all indicated serious character flaws in poor whites: "purposeless, hand to mouth, lazy, unambitious, no account, no desire to improve themselves, inertia", but, most often, "shiftless". Despite the passage of time, poor whites were still seen as white trash, a breed apart, a class partway between blacks and whites, whose shiftless ways may have even originated from their proximity to blacks.


"Trailer trash"

Trailers Trailer may refer to: a Transportation * Trailer (vehicle), an unpowered vehicle pulled by a powered vehicle ** Bicycle trailer, a wheeled frame for hitching to a bicycle to tow cargo or passengers ** Full-trailer ** Semi-trailer **Horse trailer ...
got their start in the 1930s, and their use proliferated during the housing shortage of
World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...
, when the Federal government used as many as 30,000 of them to house defense workers, soldiers and sailors throughout the country, but especially around areas with a large military or defense presence, such as
Mobile, Alabama Mobile ( , ) is a city and the county seat of Mobile County, Alabama, United States. The population within the city limits was 187,041 at the 2020 United States census, 2020 census, down from 195,111 at the 2010 United States census, 2010 cens ...
and
Pascagoula, Mississippi Pascagoula ( ) is a city in Jackson County, Mississippi, United States. It is the principal city of the Pascagoula Metropolitan Statistical Area, and is part of the Gulfport–Biloxi–Pascagoula Combined Statistical Area. The population was 22 ...
. In her book ''Journey Through Chaos'', reporter Agnes Meyer of ''
The Washington Post ''The Washington Post'' (also known as the ''Post'' and, informally, ''WaPo'') is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C. It is the most widely circulated newspaper within the Washington metropolitan area and has a large nati ...
'' travelled throughout the country, reporting on the condition of the "neglected rural areas", and described the people who lived in the trailers, tents and shacks in such areas as malnourished, unable to read or write, and generally ragged. The workers who came to Mobile and Pascagoula to work in the shipyards there were from the backwoods of the South, "subnormal swamp and mountain folk" whom the locals described as "vermin"; elsewhere, they were called "squatters". They were accused of having loose morals, high illegitimacy rates, and of allowing
prostitution Prostitution is the business or practice of engaging in Sex work, sexual activity in exchange for payment. The definition of "sexual activity" varies, and is often defined as an activity requiring physical contact (e.g., sexual intercourse, n ...
to thrive in their "Hillbilly Havens". The trailers themselves – sometimes purchased second- or third-hand – were often unsightly, unsanitary and dilapidated, causing communities to zone them away from the more desirable areas, which meant away from schools, stores, and other necessary facilities, often literally on the other side of the railroad tracks. In the mid-20th century, poor whites who could not afford to buy suburban-style
tract housing Tract housing is a type of housing development in which multiple similar houses are built on a tract (area) of land that is subdivided into smaller lots. Tract housing developments are found in suburb developments that were modeled on the "Levitt ...
began to purchase mobile homes, which were not only cheaper, but which could be easily relocated if work in one location ran out. These – sometimes by choice and sometimes through local
zoning laws Zoning is a method of urban planning in which a municipality or other tier of government divides land into areas called zones, each of which has a set of regulations for new development that differs from other zones. Zones may be defined for a si ...
– gathered in trailer camps, and the people who lived in them became known as "
trailer trash ''Trailer trash'' is a derogatory North American English term for poor people living in a trailer or a mobile home. It is particularly used to denigrate white people living in such circumstances History In the mid-20th century, poor whites who ...
". Despite many of them having jobs, albeit sometimes itinerant ones, the character flaws that had been perceived in poor white trash in the past were transferred to so-called "trailer trash", and trailer camps or parks were seen as being inhabited by retired persons, migrant workers, and, generally, the poor. By 1968, a survey found that only 13% of those who owned and lived in mobile homes had white collar jobs.


Outlook

Allyson Drinkard, Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice/Sociology, writes that as economic inequality continues to grow in the United States, the number of poor white people in both rural and urban areas will continue to grow. At the same time, as white privilege declines in general and minorities continue to hold a growing percentage of jobs in a declining job market, the poor white segment of the population will continue to be caught in the paradox of being a part of a privileged class, but without being able to benefit from their supposed privilege. Being white will no longer enable them to get and hold a good job, or to earn a suitable income. Poor white people, like other oppressed minorities, are born trapped in poverty, and – again, like other minorities – are blamed for their predicament, and for not being able to "raise themselves" out of their social conditions and economic status. Meanwhile, upper- and middle-class whites will continue to label them as "white trash" in order to solidify their feeling of superiority by making sure that "white trash" people are seen as outsiders. Nancy Isenberg, author of ''White Trash: The 400-Year Untold Story of Class in America'', says that


In popular culture


White popular culture

American pop culture connects both drinking and violence to being a white, poor, rural man.
Harriet Beecher Stowe Harriet Elisabeth Beecher Stowe (; June 14, 1811 – July 1, 1896) was an American author and abolitionist. She came from the religious Beecher family and became best known for her novel ''Uncle Tom's Cabin'' (1852), which depicts the harsh ...
's 1854 book ''A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin'' contains a chapter entitled "Poor White Trash". Stowe wrote slavery produced “a poor white population as degraded and brutal as ever existed in any of the most crowded districts of Europe.” She further expressed that this “inconceivably brutal” group of whites resemble “some blind, savage monster, which, when aroused, tramples heedlessly over everything in its way.” White supremacist Daniel R. Hundley's 1860 book ''Social Relations in Our Southern States'' includes a chapter entitled "White Trash". He used the supposed existence of poor whites with bad blood to argue that genetics and not societal structure was the problem, and that therefore slavery was justified. He called white trash the "laziest two-legged animals that walk erect on the face of the Earth", describing their appearance as "lank, lean, angular, and bony, with ... sallow complexion, awkward manners, and a natural stupidity or dullness of intellect that almost surpasses belief." In 1900,
Evelyn Greenleaf Sutherland Evelyn Greenleaf Sutherland (September 15, 1855 – December 24, 1908) was an American journalist, author and playwright. Early life A sixth-generation Bostonian, Sutherland was born on September 15, 1855, in Cambridge, Massachusetts to James a ...
's play ''Po' White Trash'', explored the complicated cultural tensions and social and racial status of poor whites in the post-Reconstruction South.
George Bernard Shaw George Bernard Shaw (26 July 1856 – 2 November 1950), known at his insistence simply as Bernard Shaw, was an Irish playwright, critic, polemicist and political activist. His influence on Western theatre, culture and politics extended from ...
uses the term in his 1909 play ''
The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet ''The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet: A Sermon in Crude Melodrama'' is a one-act play by George Bernard Shaw, first produced in 1909. Shaw describes the play as a religious tract in dramatic form.Violet M. Broad & C. Lewis Broad ''Dictionary to th ...
'', set in the wild American west. The prostitute Feemy says to Blanco "I'll hang you, you dirty horse-thief; or not a man in this camp will ever get a word or a look from me again. You're just trash: that's what you are. White trash." Ernest Matthew Mickler's ''White Trash Cooking'' (1986), based on the cooking of rural white Southerners, enjoyed an unanticipated rise to popularity.
Sherrie A. Inness Sherrie is an English female given name. It might come from the French ''chérie'', meaning ''darling'' (from the past participle of the verb ''chérir'', ''to cherish''). It may refer to: * Sherrie Hewson (born 1950), English actress * Sherrie L ...
writes that authors such as Mickler use humor to convey the experience of living on the margins of white society, and to expand the definition of American culinary history beyond upper-class traditions based on European cooking. By the 1980s, fiction was being published by Southern authors who identified as having redneck or white trash origins, such as
Harry Crews Harry Eugene Crews (June 7, 1935 – March 28, 2012) was an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist. He often made use of violent, grotesque characters and set them in regions of the Deep South. Life Harry Crews was born June 7, 1 ...
,
Dorothy Allison Dorothy Allison (born April 11, 1949) is an American writer from South Carolina whose writing focuses on class struggle, sexual abuse, child abuse, feminism and lesbianism. She is a self-identified lesbian femme. Allison has won a number of a ...
, Larry Brown, and Tim McLaurin. Autobiographies sometimes mention white trash origins. Gay rights activist Amber L. Hollibaugh wrote, "I grew up a
mixed-race Mixed race people are people of more than one race or ethnicity. A variety of terms have been used both historically and presently for mixed race people in a variety of contexts, including ''multiethnic'', ''polyethnic'', occasionally ''bi-ethn ...
, white-trash girl in a country that considered me dangerous, corrupt, fascinating, exotic. I responded to the challenge by becoming that alarming, hazardous, sexually disruptive woman."
Dolly Parton Dolly Rebecca Parton (born January 19, 1946) is an American singer-songwriter, actress, philanthropist, and businesswoman, known primarily for her work in country music. After achieving success as a songwriter for others, Parton made her album d ...
regularly referred to herself as white trash telling ''
Southern Living ''Southern Living'' is a lifestyle magazine aimed at readers in the Southern United States featuring recipes, house plans, garden plans, and information about Southern culture and travel. It is published by Birmingham, Alabama–based Southern Prog ...
'' "White trash! I am. People always say, 'Aren't you insulted when people call you white trash?' I say, 'Well it depends on who's calling me white trash and how they mean it.' But we really were, to some degree. Because when you're that poor and you're not educated, you fall in those categories.". Talking about her fame she said "There’s nothing like white trash at the White House!" She cheerfully told ''
Rolling Stone ''Rolling Stone'' is an American monthly magazine that focuses on music, politics, and popular culture. It was founded in San Francisco, San Francisco, California, in 1967 by Jann Wenner, and the music critic Ralph J. Gleason. It was first kno ...
'' she will always remain "a white-trash person". President
Jimmy Carter James Earl Carter Jr. (born October 1, 1924) is an American politician who served as the 39th president of the United States from 1977 to 1981. A member of the Democratic Party (United States), Democratic Party, he previously served as th ...
quoted a supporter who called him "white trash made good". In his 2001 biography ''An Hour Before Daylight: Memories of a Rural Boyhood'', Carter wrote about poor white people in the 1920s and 1930s rural Georgia "For those who were lazy or dishonest, or had repulsive personal habits, 'white trash' was a greater insult than any epithet based on race." ''
People A person (plural, : people) is a being that has certain capacities or attributes such as reason, morality, consciousness or self-consciousness, and being a part of a culturally established form of social relations such as kinship, ownership of pr ...
'' magazine lampooned a book on Carter as a "Southern white trash novel". In 2006,
Toby Keith Toby Keith Covel (born July 8, 1961), known professionally as Toby Keith, is an American country music singer, songwriter, actor, and record producer. He released his first four studio albums—1993's ''Toby Keith'', 1994's ''Boomtown'', 1996' ...
released an album called ''
White Trash with Money ''White Trash with Money'' is the tenth studio album by American country music artist Toby Keith. It was released on April 11, 2006 by Show Dog Nashville. This was Keith's first album for the label after DreamWorks Records went out of business. Th ...
'', which reach platinum sales levels.


Black popular culture

Use of "white trash" epithets has been extensively reported in
African American African Americans (also referred to as Black Americans and Afro-Americans) are an ethnic group consisting of Americans with partial or total ancestry from sub-Saharan Africa. The term "African American" generally denotes descendants of ens ...
culture. Black authors have noted that blacks, when taunted by whites as "
niggers In the English language, the word ''nigger'' is an ethnic slur used against black people, especially African Americans. Starting in the late 1990s, references to ''nigger'' have been progressively replaced by the euphemism , notably in ca ...
", taunted back, calling them "white trash" or "crackers". Some black parents taught their children that poor whites were "white trash". The epithet appears in black folklore. As an example, slaves would, when out of earshot of whites, refer to harsh slave owners as a "low down" man, "lower than poor white trash", or "a brute, really".
Zora Neale Hurston Zora Neale Hurston (January 7, 1891 – January 28, 1960) was an American author, anthropologist, and filmmaker. She portrayed racial struggles in the early-1900s American South and published research on Hoodoo (spirituality), hoodoo. The most ...
's 1948 ''
Seraph on the Suwanee ''Seraph on the Suwanee'' is a 1948 novel by African-American novelist Zora Neale Hurston. It follows the life of a White woman and the fraught relationship she has with her husband and family. The novel is noteworthy for its exploration of " ...
'' explored images of "white trash" women. In 2000, Chuck Jackson argued in the ''
African American Review ''African American Review'' (''AAR'') is a scholarly aggregation of essays on African-American literature, theatre, film, the visual arts, and culture; interviews; poetry; fiction; and book reviews. The journal has featured writers and cultural c ...
'' that Hurston's meditation on abjection, waste, and the construction of class and gender identities among poor whites reflects the
eugenics Eugenics ( ; ) is a fringe set of beliefs and practices that aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population. Historically, eugenicists have attempted to alter human gene pools by excluding people and groups judged to be inferior or ...
discourses of the 1920s.


See also

*
List of ethnic slurs The following is a list of ethnic slurs or ethnophaulisms or ethnic epithets that are, or have been, used as insinuations or allegations about members of a given ethnicity or racial group or to refer to them in a derogatory, pejorative, or oth ...
*
Class prejudice Class discrimination, also known as classism, is prejudice or discrimination on the basis of social class. It includes individual attitudes, behaviors, systems of policies and practices that are set up to benefit the upper class at the expense ...
* Clay eater * Cracker **
Florida cracker Florida crackers were colonial-era British and American pioneer settlers in what is now the U.S. state of Florida; the term is also applied to their descendants, to the present day, and their subculture among white Southerners. The first cracke ...
**
Georgia cracker Georgia crackers refer to the original American pioneer settlers of the Province of Georgia (later, the State of Georgia), and their descendants. In the late 19th century and the early part of the 20th century, Georgia ranchers came to be kno ...
*
Eurotrash (term) "Eurotrash" is a term for certain Europeans, particularly those perceived to be socialites, stylish and affluent. Eurotrash is often used as a collective term for such European expatriates in the United States or other areas with a concentration of ...
*
Hillbilly Hillbilly is a term (often derogatory) for people who dwell in rural, mountainous areas in the United States, primarily in southern Appalachia and the Ozarks. The term was later used to refer to people from other rural and mountainous areas west ...
*
Okie An Okie is a person identified with the state of Oklahoma. This connection may be residential, ethnic, historical or cultural. For most Okies, several (or all) of these connections exist and are collectively the source of their being Oklahoman. ...
*
Peckerwood ''Peckerwood'' is a term used in the Southern United States for a woodpecker which is also used as an offensive epithet toward white people, especially poor rural whites. Originally an ethnic slur, the term has been embraced by a subculture rela ...
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Poor White Poor White is a sociocultural classification used to describe economically disadvantaged Whites in the English-speaking world, especially White Americans with low incomes. In the United States, Poor White (or Poor Whites of the South for ...
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Redneck ''Redneck'' is a derogatory term chiefly, but not exclusively, applied to white Americans perceived to be crass and unsophisticated, closely associated with rural whites of the Southern United States.Harold Wentworth, and Stuart Berg Flexner, '' ...
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Scalawag In United States history, the term scalawag (sometimes spelled scallawag or scallywag) referred to white Southerners who supported Reconstruction policies and efforts after the conclusion of the American Civil War. As with the term '' carpetb ...
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Stereotypes of white people in the United States Stereotypes of white people in the United States are generalizations about the character, behavior, or appearance of white Americans by other Americans in the United States. For stereotypes about Americans by people of other nationalities, see Ste ...
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Trailer trash ''Trailer trash'' is a derogatory North American English term for poor people living in a trailer or a mobile home. It is particularly used to denigrate white people living in such circumstances History In the mid-20th century, poor whites who ...
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Underclass The underclass is the segment of the population that occupies the lowest possible position in a class hierarchy, below the core body of the working class. The general idea that a class system includes a population ''under'' the working class has ...
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Whiteness studies Whiteness studies is the study of the structures that produce white privilege, the examination of what whiteness is when analyzed as a race, a culture, and a source of systemic racism, and the exploration of other social phenomena generated by the ...
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Yokel Yokel is one of several derogatory terms referring to the stereotype of unsophisticated country people. The term is of uncertain etymology and is only attributed from the early 19th century. Yokels are depicted as straightforward, simple, na ...


References

Notes Bibliography * * * * * Further reading * * * * * * * * * *


External links

* Allison, Doroth
"A Question of Class"

Entertainers loved By trailer trash (videos)
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